After composing the previous post I opened up a Cecil Taylor CD (Trance), lent to me by my friend Peter Riccio. I read the liner notes, written by Erik Wiedemann in 1963… As I got to the end I could not help but laugh:
“If a man plays for a certain amount of time – scales, licks, what have you – eventually a kind of order asserts itself. Whether he chooses to notate that personal order or engage in polemics about it, it’s there. That is, if he is saying anything in his music. There is no music without order – if that music comes from a man’s innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion of what order should be as imposed by the outside. Whether that criterion is the song form or what some critic thinks jazz should be. This is not a question, then, of” freedom” as opposed to “non-freedom” but is rather a question of recognizing different ideas and expressions of order” – Cecil Taylor to Nat Hentoff, Downbeat magazine, February 25, 1965
